n00b flexi question

[Oakwood]

Hey all,

I searched around and cant really find the answer to what Im looking for so I'll try to explain...

I do all my work in illy (just updated to cs4). I have literally a thousand custom swatches (ie patterns) for illy, but if I apply one to a font and open in flexi, the font is solid black! I have tried saving, importing, exporting, as many different ways as I can think of. The only way I can get the font pattern to transfer over is if I save the file in way not applicable to contour cutting.

I know I could recreate the swatches in flexi but that would seriously take forever and its not a fun task to make seamless patterns. So I am pretty sure there is one small step I am missing somewhere...but I just cant seem to pinpoint it.

By the way, this only happens with fonts. Everything else transfers over a-ok

 

[iSign]

I would say to convert the fonts to outlines, and if the patterns are assigned as "fills" you might need to go the extra step of undoing any masks, and trimming, or welding or whatever pathfinder tools will reduce the vector paths to only showing up in the letter shapes. mybe that's how they already are, but it sounds like it could be the need to convert outlines so that's my best guess.

 

[cinemasign.grafix]

Have you tried converting to outlines?

 

[Techman]

converting to outlines
????????

 

[Oakwood]

No, the outlines didnt work, actually flexi showed nothing. In illy I went to type->create outlines, and saved as ai file. Opened in flexi, and got a blank.

hmmm...I just learned about what you guys call "fills" this weekend. I showed a long time sign maker how we do it illy and that is to save it as a swatch or pattern. We figured out how to do that in flexi, which is a lot easier than creating masks and welding and such...but I guess that's personal preference.

But anyway, still no luck. I will keep trying and if anyone thinks of something let me know.

 

[Fred Weiss]

You might try saving your AI file in a legacy format. Flexi may be struggling with opening a CS4 version.

 

[iSign]

you mention contour cutting, but I also see in your profile that you have a printer, so I'm guessing you are printing too. I think the swatches you assign as fills end up as rastor images, so I would save two versions of the file. One I would export as an RGB .tiff file. The other one I would change the fill to black, & save down to an earlier (legacy) version of illustrator as Fred suggested, for the cut line. Then import into Flex in 2 steps, align, and rip&print. This is what I do for virtually every job I print and cut, and it takes a few seconds & works every time. I'm not saying I do it will swatch fills... but importing rastor images for the print (even when they were vector) & vector images for the cut.

 

[grafxxx]

did you try expanding the fill? then exporting?

 

[Oakwood]

Fred - I did try the legacy file before posting - no luck there.

Yes, printing then cutting for this particular design. I see what your saying iSign, but doesnt that sort of nullify having flexi? So you're saying bring in my font underneath my font-swatch combo, correct?

I dont how its losing the ENTIRE information of my swatch pattern when I bring it into flexi. If I open the file back up in illy, its all there, pattern and all, still able to be outlined and everything. hmmmmmmm....

I'm still determined to get this working. Some of this is for retail type stuff, so it would be great to have one file saved that I created in illy, and print/cut in flexi on demand. I may just have to recreate all my swatches for flexi...but I sure hope not!!!

The strangest thing in general is that like I say it completely loses the color info that was on the font. I havent got to accepting customer artwork for this particular printer yet, but that may be a MAJOR problem in the future. Might have to stick to the summa pluggins (haven't really messed with those yet and they dont have one for cs4) but the flexi prints software with the roland/summa combo prints and cuts DEAD ON and I like it a lot.

 

[Oakwood]

did you try expanding the fill? then exporting?

What do you mean?

 

[Fred Weiss]

Are the seamless tile patterns you are using in Illustrator rasters or vectors?

 

[Oakwood]

Well, they should be vectors. They scale without pixelating.

Either way though, honestly, shouldnt they still be on the font regardless? If I save as a jpg or other raster image, the pattern is there. If I save as a vector, no dice.

Its just with fonts, not shapes or anything else. Can anyone else with flexi test this out? I can upload the pattern and font if needed, but it should be the same regardless.

 

[iSign]

What do you mean?

In CS4, I just made a checkerboard pattern, out of vector squares. I dragged it over to the swatch pallette. Then typed a few letters, converted to outlines & clicked on the new checkerboard swatch, which filled my letter just fine. When I turned the view from preview mode, to outline mode, the pattern doesn't show. When I go to the object menu & choose "expand" it makes the vector path of the swatch show up, as seen in this series of screen shots. If I turn on preview again, it shows up masked, but as you can see... the vectors were not present in the un-expanded file, andmasked, but not trimmed in the expanded file.

Does it render the use of Flexi pointless? Absolutely not. Flexi is a quality rip software that can import industry standard print and cut files, & handle the resizing, step and repeats, setting of profiles & using drivers for all major equipment for reliable sending of cut and print information. the fact that it is powerful design software that I don't need, doesn't bother me any more than the fact that my computer could be crunching powerful rocket science formula's but I'm not using that... at least it does what I need it to do. CS4 can't rip and print!

Oh yeah, forgot to say again... it just takes seconds to send rastor and vector info seperate & realign them... why fight it... take a few seconds and it's done. One thing though, do you see how the patter expands out to bigger than the letter? Well, you would probably want to crop the rastor image down to waste less space if fitting repeats in next to them, or trying to maximize the use of material... which could be done in Flexi, but I would spend a few more seconds & do it in photoshop before importing into Flexi.

 

[Fred Weiss]

Using a raster seamless tile made into a pattern, Illustrator CS2 and Flexi 8.6, my results were as follows:

• Image in Illustrator.
  
• Saving with font still a font ... black letters in Flexi (not shown).
  
• Saving as CS2 but with font outlined ... pattern filled letters but vector segments of some letters when opened in Flexi.
  
• Saving as version 8 but with font outlined ... pattern filled letters and no vector segments of the letters when opened in Flexi.
  

I have no idea what would happen with vector pattern fills as I have never used them. I do publish seamless texture tiles professionally and can tell you that raster versions is all I have ever seen or heard of until now.

 

[Oakwood]

hmmm...interesting indeed. On a side note I masked my pattern in cs4, saved as ai v8, opened in flexi, and the pattern is there but the holes are not!? strange, but maybe just all part of the vast learning curve.

While cs4 cant rip, print and cut (well, not as easy as flexi) I will agree, and yes it does take just seconds to do your way, thats really not ideal. For my circumstance, it would take less time (in the long run have you) to just recreate the pattern in flexi...since these are patterns I will be using more than likely daily.

Now not to get off topic and while I do like what the flexi can do, I would not call it powerful "design software". It can do all you mentioned - it rips, profiles, prints, accepts all major file types (even proprietary ones), it contours, rips, cuts, imports, exports, handles fills, and has a really sweet text view feature (when choosing a font) I would not call it powerful design software yet. Illy and ps are powerful design software, flexi is the catalyst. But I am not here to argue, I know other people who design in flexi but I would not call it a photoshop or illy...but Im still new to it...so I guess we'll see. But I would bet that for most jobs, the flexi will cut it for design software and thats really what matters.

I will have a go at this all tomorrow...its to late for coffee now.

Good night all. BTW, really impressed at the amount of comments I got from this thread already. Thanks to all =)

 

[iSign]

I would agree that it is no match for an Adobe suite. Built for the vastly smaller market of sign designers, it is fairly competent for designing a lot of what is needed in the sign industry... far more than I use it for, but agreeable far less than I could do with my preferred Adobe suite.

Good luck with the patter rebuilding thing. I would look into importing swatches before "recreating them" One last consideration... if you took the extra step of creating in Illustrator... if some day there were a problem with your version of Flexi, you were waiting for a new replacement dongle, or fighting some upgrade crash... or god forbid the software becomes unavailable someday... I'd consider the saving of a significant chunk of my daily work, ONLY in relatively obscure (from the non-sign design world standpoint) file formats, to be a somewhat less desirable & reliable situation to be in, where those extra few seconds per file would add up... you could then use your preferred powerful design program to make the files, and you would also retain them all in that format for future needs that may arise for you, your client, or vendors you may need to outsource to in the event of a catastrophic software episode...


...just playing devils advocate here... for fun. Either way, sounds like you made some progress already. When you said you "masked your pattern", do you mean manually using the "create mask" tools? or just by "filling" from the swatch palette like I did?

 

[Oakwood]

haha...I cant sleep.

yea, I created a rectangle then manually masked my pattern. Im really trying everything I can think of. Recreating one isnt that bad, I just make a rectangle, line it up, save as ai, open in flexi and save into library...doing 1000...ugh.

Fred - It looks like you hit the jackpot so I want to try to recreate this. For sake of the forum and lack of tone and such, let me go through the steps to see if I understand correctly (its still not working)
-Open illy, create text
-go to swatches and pick one, wahla, a filled pattern inside of text.
-right click, create outlines.
-save as cs2 or v8 ai.
-go to flexi - open file (I also tried drag and drop).

I just get a blank screen? Did I miss something?

 

[ChristianSlager]

Am I the ONLY one that thinks Flexi is a way better vector software than Illy?
Things that can be done in 1 or 2 steps in Flexi seem to take 4 or 5 in Illy.... Maybe I just don't know the software well enough...

 

[rocket97]

Turning illy Swatches to Flexi Patterns

I just had meesed with this a couple of weeks ago...ran into the same problems as you are saying I think...What I ended up doing is creating the patterns Illy Cs4..then opened a new file. created a normal regular old square or rectangle..applied the swatch pattern to that. then saved the file as a illy8 format like Fred said. open flexi create a new color palette name it Custom fills or something like(this is also better to have them saved here as it will cut down on start up time of flexi. Select a pattern click view>color> define pattern. save it to your newly created palette..repeat for each swatch..type in your text in flexi and just apply whatever newly created pattern you want...when you said you created a ton of swatches in illy... I am sure you already know the importance of how accurately your swatches are created in illy to start with. flexi seems very picky about how well they line up at least for me printing on an EDGE. If they are not dead on perfect I will get lines in my print...It is kind of a hillbilly workaround but it is still faster than having to recreate them all from scratch in flexi.

 

[Fred Weiss]

haha...I cant sleep.

yea, I created a rectangle then manually masked my pattern. Im really trying everything I can think of. Recreating one isnt that bad, I just make a rectangle, line it up, save as ai, open in flexi and save into library...doing 1000...ugh.

Fred - It looks like you hit the jackpot so I want to try to recreate this. For sake of the forum and lack of tone and such, let me go through the steps to see if I understand correctly (its still not working)
-Open illy, create text
-go to swatches and pick one, wahla, a filled pattern inside of text.
-right click, create outlines.
-save as cs2 or v8 ai.
-go to flexi - open file (I also tried drag and drop).

I just get a blank screen? Did I miss something?

It may be that you are experiencing a delay due to file size. Are you giving it enough time to open it if it is a large file?